DeepSeek raised about $15 billion, one of China's largest AI rounds
AspireAI · Bloomberg via The Straits Times
DeepSeek has raised about $15 billion - roughly 100 billion yuan - in one of the largest funding rounds any Chinese AI company has run.
Bloomberg reported the round first. Reuters said it was still being wrapped up, and named investors including chipmaker GigaDevice, food delivery company Meituan and automaker Geely. The Hangzhou lab raised its target at least twice mid-talks, from 50 billion yuan to 80 billion before settling higher. July filings implied a valuation near $52 billion.
For scale, OpenAI and Anthropic have each raised more than $100 billion. The money arrives weeks after US authorities restricted DeepSeek from federal procurement.
https://www.straitstimes.com/business/deepseek-raises-us15-billion-in-challenge-to-leading-us-labs
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Two sparse-autoencoder analyses have resisted scaling: matching semantically similar features across layers, and compressing large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes. This paper argues both are the same underlying problem, estimating semantic distances between SAE features that sit on different activation manifolds. Its representation treats each feature not as a single decoder vector but as an activation-weighted distribution over the hidden states expressing it, projects those distributions into a shared reference space, and compares them with Wasserstein distance. The representation is proved invariant to activation rescaling and stable under perturbation, and recovers true matches under finite-sample margin conditions. Empirically it outperformed decoder-vector and LLM-based baselines and captured subtle functional distinctions between related features, and it compressed large feature circuits into interpretable supernodes automatically. The limitation is that this is interpretability tooling: the paper demonstrates better feature matching and circuit compression, not that downstream interpretability claims become more accurate.